Domestic Violence Is a Pandemic Within the COVID-19 Pandemic

The last thing Sheila wanted to do on May 21 was drive her car. Getting behind the wheel with a concussion, multiple skull hematomas, and bruises and abrasions across her body was a decidedly bad idea. But it was the only way her husband would have let her out of the house. She told him she was going out to buy him cigarettes. The truth was, Sheila (a pseudonym to protect her identity) was heading to meet her pastor’s wife, who worked at one of the offices in the city hall of her small Nebraska town, seeking help to escape the domestic hell in which she’d been living since the start of spring. That was when the first wave of COVID-19 began and the economy collapsed, taking the trucking business her husband had started down with it. That too was when she, her husband and their four children were, like hundreds of millions of other people, forced into the high-stress, close quarters life of pandemic lockdowns. And that too, she says, is when the beatings began. No sooner did the lockdown start than he began using methamphetamine, according to Sheila, soon developing a consuming delusion that she was cheating on him and hiding a secret computer tablet somewhere in the house on which he would find evidence of her infidelity. He first confronted her in March, just as the quarantining began—and first struck her then too. “He smacked me hard, I hit the floor, and then he dumped his drink in my face,” she says. Her escape on May 21 put an end to the abu...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news